With the recent popularity in the use of flat panel displays, a number of competing electrical digital signaling standards dominates the digital display industry. Low-voltage differential signaling, or LVDS, is an electrical digital signaling standard that can run at very high speeds over inexpensive twisted-pair copper cables. LVDS has been popular and is used in products like LCD-TVs, automotive instrument displays, industrial camera and machine vision products, notebook displays and tablet displays for computers.
Embedded Display Port (EDP) is another display standard with a goal to define a standardized display panel interface for internal (embedded) connections between for example graphics cards and notebook display panels. Compared to LVDS, the highest data rate found in LVDS interfaces between an image processing IC and a timing controller IC is about 1.05 Gbit/s, per-pair. On the other hand, EDP achieves 2.7 Gbit/s or almost three fold increase in speed and data throughput.
Another digital display signaling standard is the Display Serial Interface (DSI), a specification introduced by the Mobile Industry Processor Interface (MIPI) Alliance with a goal at reducing the cost of display sub-systems in a mobile device. The DSI defines a serial bus and a communication protocol between the host (source of the image data) and the device (destination of the image data). DSI specifies a high-speed differential signaling point-to-point serial bus.
Since all three digital signaling standards are directed to LCDs and with the current explosion in the use of hand held devices using LCDs, there is a need to have a single digital display bridge device that can be used with any of the three dominate digital display standards.